Unreal Estate

On the eve
of the Olympics, Justin McGuirk ponders the social and political consequences of
London's white-hot real estate market and asks: what ever happened to the city
that pioneered the modern ideal of social housing?

At the Haggerston
West Estate in Hackney, East
London, giant heads stare out from the windows.
These are portraits of the remaining residents.
Many of the other windows are boarded up with
orange panels, which started to be installed five
years ago when this building was condemned.
A group of artists called Fugitive Images
, whose
members are among those still living here, decided
to battle these symbols of dereliction with signs of
life. The message is spelled out across three groundfloor
windows: I Am Here.

The building next door has already gone. The
construction hoarding around this void is
advertising a "luxury development" called
Haggerston Square. The artist's impression shows
a series of large blocks with multicoloured facades.
"Coming Soon," it says.

There's been a lot of this recently. Across Hackney,
from Haggerston to Dalston and Homerton, luxury
development is on the march. You wonder what
criteria developers need to satisfy to qualify for
that term "luxury". Is it the use of plasticky facade
panels? But more worrying is what they are
replacing, which in some cases are council estates
like the one with the defiant portraits. Built in the
1930s — on a block that Charles Booth's Poverty
Map
had classified as "vicious, semi-criminal" —
these "neo-Georgian flatted dwellings" are now
in the middle of one of the most competitive
development zones in London. It will apparently
be replaced by a "lively", "vibrant", "diverse"
community. "Why are these communities never
seen that way before the developers come in?"
asks Andrea Luka Zimmerman of Fugitive Images,
skewering the marketing-brochure patter. "This is
language as an empty signifier."

Across London, council housing is out and the
luxury development is in. This is the endgame of
a process that began 30 years ago, when Thatcher
pulled the plug on state-built social housing and
gave millions of people renting it the "right to
buy". Londoners are innately aware of the effect
those two policies have had on their lives. An acute
housing shortage along with the privatisation of
social housing has made it near impossible not just
for lower-income but also middle-class people to
own property anywhere near the city centre. The
housing crisis has been getting worse since the
recession, with housebuilders building less and
banks not lending. Rents rose 12 per cent last year,
waiting lists are getting longer and homelessness
is going up.

Top: Elephant and Castle: The Heygate Estate
in Elephant and Castle,
which is boarded up and
awaiting demolition as part
of a massive regeneration project. In the distance is the
Strata Tower, built in 2010,
a totem of developer-led
regeneration and laissezfaire
planning. Above: Bow: Terraced housing, postwar
council housing and a
revamped 1960s tower block
coexist in Bow

"You could get lost in this concrete jungle / new
builds keep springing up outta nowhere," sings
rapper Plan B
in his recent single Ill Manors
, an
angry jab at the social conditions that led to last
year's riots. The video was shot in the Forest
Gate
area of Newham, in East London, one of the
poorest boroughs in the country. Here and in other
boroughs in and around the London Olympics site,
thousands of new units are being built in one of
the biggest regeneration projects the city has ever
seen. You wouldn't know there was a housing
crisis on. But then Londoners are used to these
paradoxes. It rained almost every day in April and
the papers were full of headlines about drought.
The water table is low apparently. Well, despite all
the new builds, the housing table is low too, from
decades' worth of undersupply.

In the postwar years of the welfare state consensus
local authorities were building hundreds of
thousands of homes a year in England. That
rate of production was relatively constant until
the late 1970s, regardless of which party was in
power. But if you look at a graph of social housing
production you'll see it drop sharply from 1979, the
year Thatcher took office, and fall steadily through
subsequent governments to almost zero — a trend
that New Labour's policy of forcing developers to
include some affordable housing did very little to
reverse. Thatcher believed that the private sector
should and would step in where the government
had stepped away — creating a nation of homeowning
Tory voters. But her faith in the market
proved very wide of the mark. Housebuilders have
been building roughly the same number of houses
per year since the mid-1950s. There was no rushing
into the breach. Which means that either they are
building at capacity or there is simply no incentive
for them to produce more. After all, why would they
devalue their product by lowering the demand?

On a Saturday in Bow
, there are dozens of groups
setting off on guided tours of the Olympic site. "Let's
all go on an urban safari," goes Ill Manors
. From
here at Three Mills Green, south of the Olympic
Park, you can already see a new landscape taking
shape in the distance. The Spirit of Stratford
,
a 43-storey residential tower in the freshly
regenerated Stratford City, is the new beacon in
this part of town. With its rainbow facade, like a
vertical case of Caran d'Ache colouring pencils, it's
a developer's wet dream. It's also the sort of highrise
that was supposed to be unpopular in this
country, discredited architecturally and politically,
at least when it was called council housing. But
this hulking, neoliberal variant is apparently
acceptable, not least because it is helping Newham
to meet its housing targets — 655 units of "legacy"
right here. The fact that flats in the Spirit of
Stratford are selling like hot cakes to buy-to-let
customers in China, however, suggests that it may
not help solve the borough's housing crisis.

Hackney: Portraits of the
remaining residents
defy the impending
demolition of the
1930s Haggerston
West Estate

Newham sparked a political scandal recently when
it emerged that it was having to house hundreds of
families in Stoke-on-Trent, 160 miles from London.
With the Coalition government's cap on housing
benefits, the borough said it simply couldn't afford
to house these residents locally. Critics of the
Coalition have been predicting that its austerity
policies would see a mass exodus of the poor from
the capital. Even the Tory Mayor of London Boris
Johnson
distanced himself from the government
on this one, claiming he wouldn't allow "Kosovo-style
social cleansing" in his city. The mayor is
prone to hyperbolic rhetoric, but on this occasion
he was perhaps a little too vivid for his own good,
allowing the most damning critique of 21st-century
London yet uttered to fall from his own lips.

And that's not all. The news has been full of reports
that Newham is cultivating a new breed of secret
slum. In the back alleys between terraced houses,
landlords have been erecting flimsy extensions —
"super-sheds" the papers call them — crowded full
of immigrant workers paying hundreds of pounds
a week. "It doesn't take long for you to make a
lot of money out of it, provided you are prepared
to trade in human misery," Newham's mayor
Robin Wales told the Guardian
. So here at last
are the Euro-slums, the return of the Dickensian
rookeries. If they didn't exist, London would have
to invent them. A special taskforce is charged with
rooting out the super-sheds using helicopters and
aerial photography. Meanwhile, only a mile or
so away, the shimmering new Stratford City and
its Westfield mega-mall promise to serve a new,
upwardly mobile community.

Just across the newly cleaned River Lea, Bow is
home to more phenomena that sound like urban
myths but happen to be true. Residents are jittery
over plans to install anti-aircraft missiles on the
roof of an apartment building here to prevent a
9/11-style terrorist attack during the Olympics.

Less sensational but more interesting in the
long run is that, nearby, Ikea is building a whole
neighbourhood of 1,200 homes. Strand East
, as
this 26-hectare former industrial site is called, has
had the pundits reaching for jokes about flat-pack
housing. There is little to see at this point apart from
some bulldozed land, a few preserved warehouses
and a giant wooden tower modelled on the Olympic
Torch. Though CABE
, the architecture watchdog,
has criticised the limited amount of public space in
Ikea's proposal, the early plans suggest that Strand
East will be considerably more sensitive than the
vision perpetrated in Stratford. Which raises the
possibility that even this unexpected corner of the
private sector understands city-making better than
many developers.

Across London, council housing is out and the luxury development is in. This is the endgame of a process that began 30 years ago, when Thatcher pulled the plug on state-built social housing and gave millions of people renting it the "right to buy"

The Occupy camp in
Finsbury Square, a symbolic
site of resistance to the
power of the City

The same is probably not true of supermarket
giant Tesco, which plans to build its own little
town just down the river. What sits there now is
the Bromley-by-Bow Tesco superstore, a fading
suburban model sandwiched between the A12 and
its own vast parking lot. The supermarket aims to
build around 300 homes here, divided between
a mid-rise city block and a glass tower, neither of
which look like they have anything to do with the
other. Only 76 are slated as "affordable". Affordable
housing is what we have instead of social housing,
and the Coalition government has decreed that
affordable rents can now be up to 80 per cent of
market value, which means that they are hardly
for the poorest. But the real question over both
the Ikea and Tesco schemes is whether they offer
anything new. Will there be insidious branding,
product placement, public-private ambiguity and
all the trappings of an Ikea or Tesco Merzbau? In
London, letting global retail corporations build
entire communities counts as innovation. And
the floodgates are now open. If McDonalds, an
official sponsor of the Olympics, decided it wanted
to go into housing in East London, the path would
be clear. Luckily, it decided to build the biggest
restaurant in the world here instead.

Dispiriting though much of this is, it would be
churlish not to mention that East London is also
home to some enlightened housing projects
of recent years. Staying in Bow, there is Peter
Barber's Donnybrook Quarter
, a mix of terraced
and courtyard houses like a North African kasbah
reimagined. A few miles east of the Olympic Park,
there is the redevelopment of Barking town centre
by ahmm and muf, where new flats and amenities
are arranged around a truly thoughtful public
square. Down the road is ahmm and Maccreanor
Lavington's Anne Mews
, two rows of generous
brick terraces, just across the tracks from another
Peter Barber project, Tanner Street Gateway. These
are all-too-rare cases of housing that delivers more
than the bare minimum, that has civic ambition.

And Anne Mews is even more rare for being council
housing rather than merely providing a percentage
of affordable homes. The chances of projects like
this being delivered again in the near future are
slim, now that the mayor has cut the funding for
housing associations by more than 70 per cent.
Where is the extra money to come from? The private
sector of course.

London is perpetually redefining the extremes of
what the private sector can deliver. If it can produce
super-shed slums, it can also lead the world in
ludicrously expensive pieds-à-terre. Take One Hyde
Park
in Knightsbridge, a development designed
by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners
for the Candy
brothers. The ground floor hosts a branch of the Abu
Dhabi Islamic Bank, while somewhere above that a
flat sold last year for 135 million pounds. Needless to
say, there is no "affordable housing" quotient — at 80
per cent rents even your average mining magnate
would struggle — but that's because the developers
of such elite cribs pay the council to build the social
units somewhere else.

Left, Barking: One of the 1960s council
housing towers on the
Gascoigne Estate, which is
gradually being demolished. Right, Southwark: Neo Bankside, a luxury
condominium designed by
Rogers Stirk Harbour +
Partners next to Tate Modern

One of the problems of the capital's property
market — for locals that is — is that it's such a safe
investment. London is a haven for fleeing capital.
A wave of political and economic crises abroad has
brought money flooding into the property market
recently from Libya and Egypt, Italy and Greece. But
beyond the security of its bricks and mortar, London
is also the capital of a de facto
tax haven for the
super-rich. The fact that so-called non-domiciles —
or "non-doms" — flock here makes life more difficult
for the rest of us. The UK government courts them
because it believes in the "trickle down" effect of
their enormous wealth. But not only is this notion
now thoroughly discredited, there is, as David
Harvey tells us, no spatial version of "trickle down".
More expensive flats for the rich do not lead to more
flats for the poor — quite the opposite. "The idea that
a city can do well (in terms of capital accumulation)
while its people (apart from a privileged class)… do
badly, is never examined," says Harvey.

At the Heygate Estate
in Elephant and Castle,
in South London, 1,260 flats are boarded up and
awaiting demolition. These giant slabs of municipal
modernism are victims of a Thatcherite political
agenda that successfully vilified council housing
for its attendant social problems, especially if it was
on an industrial scale and smacked of mid-century
architectural utopianism. The rhetoric of "failed
estates" — or "ill manors" as Plan B calls them — held
architects responsible, deploying gifts such as the
collapse of the Ronan Point tower in 1968 rather than
a failure to invest in maintenance.

You can still stroll Heygate's elevated walkways
overlooking its generous gardens. Predictably,
around the jungle gym someone's shooting a
pop video. Here and in Haggerston, it is the final
ignominy of council housing that it should serve
only as a gritty stage set or as a support for art. But
if this defunct future is picturesquely depressing,
the new future is just demoralising. It comes with
barcode facades and wind turbines purely for
show, like the Strata tower
right next door.

The Heygate Estate
in Elephant and Castle,
which is boarded up and
awaiting demolition as part
of a massive regeneration

Replacing Heygate will be a new development of
2,500 units, so twice as dense, but only 25 per cent
will be "affordable". Former mayor Ken Livingstone
had managed to get the affordable housing
quota up to 50 per cent of new developments, but
Johnson scrapped that policy in favour of allowing
boroughs to set their own targets. So only about
half of the original residents will now be able to
return, and only if they can afford it. The residents
of Haggerston are luckier, since all of them will
be rehoused in the new development, "pepperpotted",
as the jargon has it, with wealthier private
owners. Whatever your views on mixed-income
housing — whether you see it as gentrification or
social diversity — what the destruction of these
estates represents is the end of social housing
as a zone of exception, free from the logic of the
market. Politically, of course, this is old news. What
Heygate represents is merely the erasure of the
evidence. To defend a Heygate — or, more popularly,
a Robin Hood Gardens
— is decried as fetishism.

Which may be justified if the fetish is for a moment
when architects still had political agency, but not if
it's for the remnants of a progressive politics.
The population of London is projected to grow from
7.9 million to 9 million by 2030, which means we
need to build 32,000 homes a year to keep up with
demand. We're building about half that. The problem
with relying on the private sector to deliver those
homes is not just that too few of them fall into the
hands of the needy. There's a fundamental economic
disincentive, since there is just as much money to be
made speculating on and refinancing the existing
output as there is in producing more. Harvey again:
"Stimulating demand by taxation and public policy
gimmicks and other incentives (such as increasing
the volume of sub-prime mortgages) does not
necessarily elicit an increased supply: it merely
inflates prices and stimulates speculation."

If it is not yet clear after 30 years of grinding those
wheels that the market cannot solve the housing
crisis, then I'm not sure when it will be. Similarly, it
is obvious to anyone who lives in this city that the
market does not operate in the interests of those
on lower incomes. So why do we keep slavishly
turning to the market? It is a hopeless moment
to make this argument, with the government
slashing funds for social-rented housing across the
country, but it's time for the public sector to resume
its responsibilities. It's not just the only way for the
government to meet its beloved targets; it's the
only way to re-establish the zones of exception that
protect ordinary citizens from a ruthless market.
Justin Mcguirk (@justinmcguirk)